Ynet reports in Hebrew that the ads will focus on Israel’s supposed prowess in “green technologies” with claims that Israel is a world leader in water desalination, that 40 percent of its drinking water is desalinated, and that 70 percent of Israeli sewage is recycled and used in agriculture.

These technologies, the ads will claim, are of benefit to people all over the world.

Israel’s effort to shift the focus away from its occupation, oppression and colonization of Palestinians and their land, has in recent years taken the form of “pinkwashing” – using Israel’s supposed tolerance for gay rights to market it as a liberal haven.

The strategy of “greenwashing” is intended to work in a similar manner.

Environmental catastrophes brought about by Israel

Yet, the “greenwashing” strategy should provide new opportunities for the Palestine solidarity movement to focus on the environmental catastrophes Israel has created on land, sea and air.

Some of the things the Green Israel ad campaign is unlikely to talk about:

According to the OECD, Israeli “water quality” is ranked 35 out of 36 countries, better only than the Russian Federation. Israel’s water score “is much lower than the OECD average” according to the OECD, “and suggests Israel still faces difficulties in providing good quality water to its inhabitants.”

Similar problems face air quality: Israel is ranked 27 out of 36 for harmful particulate matter in the air and, “Particulate matter and ground-level ozone concentrations frequently exceed limit values for the protection of human health.”

Because of Israeli discrimination, Palestinians face severe shortages of water, a report from Amnesty International found. Palestinians are systematically denied water for basic needs, and hundreds of thousands don’t even have running water. Israel hogs 80 percent of the water from the West Bank’s main aquifer, while allowing Palestinians a mere 20 percent. In the West Bank, 450,000 settlers use as much or more water than the Palestinian population of some 2.3 million.

It's not just propaganda. Desalination is hardly a green solution, which contaminates the water it drinks from, and more often than not its powered by fossil fuels (in Israel it is anyway). Additionally, Israel is selling it world-wide. Who profits? http://pulsemedia.org/2010/10/...